


Lay Them Down

by shabnam_e_maghz



Series: Lay Them Down [1]
Category: Inception
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-29
Updated: 2010-09-29
Packaged: 2017-10-12 07:15:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/122285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shabnam_e_maghz/pseuds/shabnam_e_maghz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/Aja">Aja</a>, for the prompt: Five times Eames saw through Arthur, and one time Arthur let him look. Expansion on an earlier fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lay Them Down

**Author's Note:**

> THIS IS ALL AJA'S FAULT, I'll have you know! She asked me to expand my original response to a kink meme prompt – and so I did.
> 
> I tried to break down their exchanges in the movie and figure out, for my head's universe, what made them tock, mostly. And I tried not to overindulge myself in melodramatically uber-condensation, but I maybe didn't succeed at that one. ;)

I.  
Arthur sat down on the curb to nurse his jaw, his expression somewhere between a glower and a pout.

"I really rather wish that entire kerfuffle had been in dreamspace," said the gambler – Eames – moving to sit beside him. "I don't think I would've socked you quite so hard if I'd remembered it wasn't."

The gambler's pause was waiting, probably, for Arthur to say the feeling was mutual.

"The pain would have been the same," said Arthur instead.

There was a moment of silence, until Arthur broke it with: "How does a man like you know about dreamshare."

"Dreamshare and I both hail from the same corner," Eames answered.

"You used to be an army man?" Arthur asked.

"You could put it that way, yes," said Eames.

"More artillery than hand-to-hand, then."

Eames smiled.

"Where did you learn to forge?"

"Where did you learn to fight?"

Arthur opened his mouth, but thought better of himself and instead said: "That's for me to know and you to find out."

"Oh, Arthur," Eames began, and Arthur almost started at the inflection. He supposed it was supposed to be amused or indulgent or something. It wasn't weird, per se.

Arthur had used that tone that time Mal appeared in Cobb's dream, Nash when his girlfriend left and said she couldn't take all this anymore, and – well, not to beat around the bush, that particular inflection, that exact inflection, that "Oh, Arthur," rang most vividly in Arthur's mind as coming from his professor's voice. His last office hours of the year, a handshake and a congratulations, and Arthur telling him he was looking into dreamshare. "Oh, Arthur," he had said.

Eames didn't even know him yet.

Arthur's voice was sharp. "We're not on a first-name basis," he said.

"Not yet, maybe," said Eames. "Don't be so sour, eh? No harm's been done, and I am feeling so very generous tonight that I won't ask for a cut from your share."

"Why do you assume it's done by shares?" Arthur asked. "Are paychecks that alien to you?"

"Not to me," said Eames. "But perhaps to dreamshare. Let me clarify, actually: to extraction. They are alien to extraction, and that I just dove into was an extraction job."

Arthur opened his mouth and then closed it. It would be a bit preposterous to take that bluff with someone who had swanned into a job and covered for Arthur's almost tearing it to pieces.

"Who exactly are you?" he asked.

"How many years have you been involved in illicit dreamshare?"

"How many years would you guess?" asked Arthur, voice sharpening.

"Do you want me to answer that?"

Arthur paused. "No," he said, trying to smile.

"I've been calling your bluffs all night, after all," Eames said idly.

"Arthur!"

That would be Cobb.

"I'm sorry, Cobb, it was my fault, I lost my temper. I realize it was idiotic and it won't happen again."

"Forget it," said Cobb. "As long as we got away with it. Though I – didn't think this would be a problem for you. Work on it, right? Who's this."

The last was addressed to Eames, who introduced himself as the one who had got the little prep student to lose his temper.

"He was also the one who saved the situation," said Arthur, looking up at Cobb. "I haven't been able to find out the first thing about him."

"I've been very reasonable about it," said Eames.

"Where did you learn to forge?"

"Forget it, Cobb, I've asked."

"Name?"

"I said I'd give mine if he gave his."

"You already know my first name!" Arthur said. "You already _knew_ my first name when you asked."

"I already knew the answers to all the questions I've posed you today," Eames said blandly. "You still might have answered. It's a perfectly normal response, you know."

"Eames, you said, right?" Cobb said, raising his voice and reaching out a hand. "I've heard of you, the famous down-and-out freewheeler. Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Eames."

"Pleasure's all mine," said Eames, taking Cobb's hand. "I've heard plenty about you, too, Dom Cobb. And even about little Arthur over there."

"We're _not_ on a first-name basis," Arthur said, and then – "What do you mean you already knew all of them?"

Eames turned to face Arthur, and then broke into a perhaps deliberately slow smile.

"You're in your late twenties, I'd guess twenty-seven, and I'd hazard you're a bachelor – of arts and sciences, that is. You dove into dreamshare right after graduating, maybe from an internship or some research in your last years, who knows. You've been in dreamshare for five or six years, then, and you've become very high-profile, due partially to talent and smarts, but mostly because you play big but you also play safe. I'm sorry, I meant careful. And as for learning to fight."

Eames leaned forward and smiled conspiratorially.

"I'm pegging that as some nasty defensive hallway scuffles in seventh or eighth grade."

Arthur went mute, and Eames broke into a broad smile. There wasn't really a follow-up to that, and for one full, terrible moment, Arthur's mouth was left slack in a silence thick as butter.

 

II.  
Three weeks later, there was a new job and Eames was part of the team.

"Face it, Arthur, the man is amazing," Cobb had said.

"I know," said Arthur. "I agree. You don't have to persuade me; I don't have a problem with it."

"I just know he acted – " Cobb began, delicately.

"There were a few non sequiturs in there when we met," Arthur agreed. "It's fine, Cobb. We need a forger."

And he was fine with it. It wasn't even an issue either way, really. Arthur didn't dislike Eames or anything. It wasn't even a thing.

Or so Arthur assumed, until Eames actually showed up.

"Hi there, Arthur," he said brightly, and "You've had at the wardrobe a bit, I see."

Arthur's teeth actually ground.

"Nice place here," Eames added to Cobb, looking around. "Gang of four, I see. Righto then. Let's get this started."

"Brief him, Cobb," said Arthur, and stood up to leave. "I guess I don't have to be there for that."

It was not, it was absolutely not fair.

Arthur felt comfortable in collars and pressed pants. He had only started wearing them in college when he, with everyone else in the world, chose to redefine his sartorial identity. One day he had borrowed a roommate's suit for a guest lecture and had had an epiphany and never stopped ironing his shirts since.

It was natural as breathing.

He had worked hard at it.

Nobody had noticed when one week he sat down and had at Windsor knots, because no one notices that. He just felt quietly proud of himself.

And it was unfair, ridiculous and unfair, that right now Arthur felt twelve, twelve and helpless and encompassed, and had been struck through and fuck it, he didn't even want to hit anything, he wanted to cry. Not, like, sit down for a second, he, God, he actually felt like he might cry, a grown man.

"Oh, fuck it, fuck it, fuck it," he said, and he wouldn't cry, he wouldn't, he wouldn't, he wouldn't.

 

III.  
"You get a bit catty when you're hungry, then, eh, Arthur?"

"I'm sorry my hunger caused me to poke a hole in your ever-so-elegent nonsense strategy, Eames," Arthur answered. He'd been caught off guard twice, but he'd be a sorry operative if he couldn't adapt to schoolyard bullying.

It wasn't exactly schoolyard bullying, but Arthur didn't want to spend his actual time classifying it.

"He's right," said Cobb. "We've got to do better than that. What do we know about her family?"

And that's when Arthur pulled out a folder and smiled.

Cobb had probably noticed the competitive undertone that was beginning to develop with regard to this particular mission.

And Eames, it turned out, was not a particularly graceful man when the shoe was on the other foot. Not that Arthur could jolt through and pierce Eames' world through with a word, but what he could do was win at things.

Eames, apparently, didn't do well with being beaten.

"And what if our beloved subject here throws a curveball and doesn't fall for such a cookie-cutter extraction?"

"He hasn't been trained against extraction. There's no reason to try a riskier approach," said Arthur.

"What if he's ever even once heard of extraction, hm," said Eames. "I don't suppose you've ever been up against a subconscious that suspects something it can't quite put its finger on, but —"

"A militarized subconscious attacks extractors as if with bug spray," Arthur said. "An unmilitarized subconscious occasionally might feel as if we're an itch it ought to scratch. I trust you can handle the latter."

"And a subconscious that suspects something but is untrained," said Eames, "has a nasty tendency to instinctively slap at itself, like an arm that somehow knows this itch on its arm is a spider or an ant. It's an awfully nasty curveball to hope you'll miss."

"We'll use the mazes," Cobb said.

"Mazes."

"Arthur's been working on developing a system of delaying subconscious response by designing dreams to work as labyrinths," Cobb said, turning to the paperboard. "It delays any subconscious assaults while allowing us to take direct paths to our destinations. Well. 'Direct.'"

"Refute that plan, Mr. Eames," suggested Arthur, leaning back and smiling.

He got to feel that arch once more before that mission closed – when Eames lost control of his hang glider and would have tumbled had Arthur not tipped him back up with his glider's wing.

"A few more hours' practice wouldn't have hurt after all, then, Mr. Eames, I suppose," he said, feeling like a child at Christmas.

"You have a bit of a competence complex, don't you, dear," said Eames. "Careful with that."

And then he improvised a slipstream air current, an unecessarily elegent virtuoso forgery, and before Arthur could try to fight back against it and regain control of his glider, Eames reached out and arm and steadied it for him. And didn't move it, preventing Arthur from coasting out of it and back onto the track.

"Don't fight it, it's a shortcut," he said. "Those are _my_ specialty."

It was this, this would-be mysterious stranger business, the misfiring charm. He was too fundamentally charismatic to be contemptible; he was too uncomfortably familiar, too awkwardly intimate, to be agreeable. What Arthur was left with was someone he basically liked well enough, and whose company he never enjoyed.

"So you have an allergy to perspicacity?" suggested Nash.

"I work in dreamshare. The last thing I have is an allergy to perspicacity."

"Look, he does it with everyone. What, you're too damn special for anyone to read you? Seriously, Arthur. Here, it's not rocket science. Your favorite subject in school was probably – "

Arthur stood up, the front legs of his chair hitting the warehouse floor with a sharp, resonant crack. "Don't you start with that, too," he said, and left.

 

IV.  
In his dreams, Arthur had never finished his senior year of college. In his dreams, Cobb was still the graduate student working on developing dreamshare technology, he was still the clever young man Arthur had met at orientation who was engaged to his thesis partner. In his dream, Arthur can still be a freshman, and he still receives letters inviting him to the wedding; students still joke about him latching onto Dom, who's latching onto his advisor's daughter; Mal still sits pensively tapping her lip with a pencil before standing up and saying, "No, what about this?" and coming up with something brilliant.

Arthur is still helping out with the labs, wondering if Dom could ask him for a recommendation from the professor. Arthur is still curious, still passionate, about dreamshare.

" _Non, non,_ Arthur," Mal still laughs in his dreams. " _Rien de rien_. Try again!"

"Rrrrien de rrrrien," Arthur tries, and even he knows that whatever that sound is, it's not French.

"Ah, hopeless," Mal still says, and Dom smiles. "I'm hopeless, too," he says.

"There is hope for you," Mal tells him over her shoulder. "Arthur takes this to a whole new level of hopeless."

"Thank goodness the singing is up to Edith Piaf, then," Arthur says.

And then, too, in his dreams, the eternal moments are always broken by a rumbling echo, and this time as Mal stood up to walk toward Dom, to put her arm around his waist, to smile, they seemed to move in slow motion. Time realigned; this was slow motion, in the end. And now it was frozen motion; Mal smiling, Dom who went by Dom, Arthur in sweaters, only in dreams were these in the present tense.

" _Tout ça bien egal,_ " rung in his ears, and Arthur awoke with damp eyes.

"One day," said Eames, "you are going to leave Cobb."

Arthur started.

"Whoa, there, old boy, it's just me," Eames said, as if that explained anything.

Arthur sat up straight again, putting a hand over his chest and trying to calm his breathing. He glared venom at Eames and said: "You didn't. You did not."

"I did not," Eames said, leaning back and setting his arms out, wrists-up. He had bothered to roll up his sleeves past his forearms in advance.

Arthur got up and looked at the PASIV's saline records. Only one person had been under.

"You know it's easier to fuck with the saline levels than to hide a sore vein," Eames said.

Arthur breathed deeply, still trying to calm down.

"I don't," he began. "Get out. No. You have no business."

"It's unusual to see you here," Eames said. "I'm used to seeing Cobb. He's the one who likes to run after-hours … experiments, eh?"

There was a defusing levity to his voice, for which Arthur could have hit him.

"Oh, pish, Arthur, I'm saying that's why I'm here. I don't go under. I just stand here and hold Cobb's hand and make sure he doesn't wake up to an empty warehouse, yeah?"

"Cobb trusts you, then."

"He never asked me, but as he's never told me to get out, yes, I rather suppose he does.

"And today," Eames said. "Today I come here and find you."

"And what you choose to tell me," said Arthur, "is that you think one day I'm going to leave Cobb. You're a real charmer, you know."

"People have told me."

"I'm not – firstly, I'm not staying _with_ Cobb. There's no leaving to do. It's like saying I'd leave Nash. It's not even. It doesn't." Arthur cut himself off, and his eyes narrowed in frustration. "I'm not," he said sharply, "staying with Cobb to look after him. He does not need looking after."

"I know that you don't look after him," Eames said quietly. "What I'm saying is that one day you will leave him. One day, that unhinged look in his eye will get the better of him, and when the kick comes he will say that he is fine, that he'll stay under, and you won't have time for it. And you'll leave, and he'll stay, and, Arthur, that day you'll grow up."

"The look in his eye," Arthur repeated.

"You may not notice the way he walks in dreams," Eames said, "or the way his eyes darken. But you know he stays after to dream, and you know he has to use a totem." He stopped, almost reflecting, face flickering with thoughts and connections inscrutable to Arthur as Arthur's face was transparent to him. "My God. You'll leave him within a year. You'll let him collapse within a year."

Arthur remembered the dream Mal had appeared in, remembered saying, "Cobb. How does Dinney know her?" and Cobb saying, softly, "He doesn't."

"I have a friend," Eames said. "In Mombasa. Who had – who has the same trouble Cobb had. Of course I can't tell Cobb about that, but I can try to – "

"I _had_ a friend," Arthur said sharply. "Who had something much, much worse than Cobb, and who probably had it much worse than your friend in Mombasa, and who can never, ever be contained in the way I act, or the way Cobb walks in dreams, and I had to deal with it when I was twenty-two, and I am not a child. You can't condescend to me, and I can't be – contained – I – "

Arthur stood up and felt himself already suppressing the gut punch, suppressing and ignoring and denying it because it rang false, rang fundamentally false, but Eames was never wrong and in that case, if this came true it would the strongest blow anyone had ever landed on him.

He didn't say a word and walked out and, more than the sudden fear and fury and desire to prove things, he felt the desire for it to end for once differently.

 

V.  
Arthur didn't actually do much in between jobs. He couldn't visit his family, which was a small loss as he likely wouldn't have done that even if he had become a doctor or a professor or a Habitat for Humanity organizer.

He had visited Dom's family once, which had felt endlessly strange, and he had felt out of place. Even what little memories he could attach to Mal's mother, to the kids, felt as if they belonged to a different person, an open, more childish person, and in the end he couldn't even figure out how to tell Dom about the visit, and so he didn't.

Mostly he'd stay in bed and breakfasts, going on jogs and winning over whoever was hosting him. He didn't see it as a challenge per se, but he did keep mental track of how much homemade jam he had accrued. Depending on the town, he'd sometimes go clubbing. One time he'd had a rather enjoyable one-night stand with a good-looking guy from a bar and left in the morning because he assumed that was the protocol, and another time he'd had a comparatively less enjoyable one-night stand with a tall girl from a club, which had actually wound up turning into a several-week series of one-night stands. In the end she'd dumped him and not the other way around, so he assumed she had just wanted to end it on her terms. He chose not to admit that he missed her afterward.

And then Cobb called, and once they got to the warehouse and met Nash and Jillian, he said: "I'm going to send a line out to Eames."

"You don't have to ask permission," Arthur said, and was grateful that Cobb kept doing so anyway.

And that time Arthur just didn't talk to Eames at all, avoided eye contact as much as possible, and was suddenly reminded, painfully, every time, of what Eames had said about Cobb, what Arthur had forgotten almost immediately after the discussion had happened because it was so untrue, so fundamentally untrue.

And now he looked at Cobb with fresh eyes again. Cobb, who was alive and strong and organized and who kept breaking rules and getting away with disaster, who was a disorganized mess and one of the best in the business, who frustrated Arthur beyond belief and kept messing things up and then doing the impossible. Cobb, when Eames was in the room, was the same person. And he was, too, Arthur could see, when Eames was in the room, a fragile, disintegrating mess.

Eames continued the trend of not really talking much to Arthur, which worked out pretty well for both of them. Except once, when Amina told Arthur to slow down his explanation, and he supposed he didn't, very much, and so Eames tipped his chair back and reached his fingers into Arthur's front pants pocket, pulling out a notebook, and, with brows mock furrowed, starting to take notes.

"Give that back, Eames," said Arthur, with an expression that all but added, "we are not amused."

He talked slower, which he assumed had been the point of that, and not the actual notebook heist, or fingers light on his thigh through his the fabric of his pants.

But then again, Eames did it again on the actual heist, too, reaching casually back to grab a ballpoint from Arthur's pocket to pick the old-fashioned iron lock to the room behind the false library shelf.

"You have a pen behind your ear," Arthur had protested, resenting the hitch of breath halfway through.

"But you seem like you're paying more attention now," Eames said with a light grin, and that was when Arthur – okay, so this one wasn't really the sort of the below the belt shot he had gotten from Eames in the past, but still, Arthur was familiar with certain taunts growing up, and assaults both verbal and physical toward the end of middle school, and the response – serious and vicious, or amused and still unrelenting underneath – was still reflexive.

It was probably a point in Eames' favor that Arthur settled for the second reaction with him, and it was with good nature that he tore an entire bookcase out of the wall and hurled it at Eames' head.

"You know that he doesn't pay you special attention in any way, right?" said Nash after the job was over, as they were packing. "If anything, he's more careful around you. You just have the hair trigger."

"Why do you keep talking about this?" said Arthur. "Look, I'm really, really, really sorry about that. It didn't jeopardize the mission, one angry librarian projection is nothing to get all worked up about, the mission went perfect."

"The question is not whether he treats you different," said Nash. "The question, by the way, and the one you ought to start asking yourself before you fuck us all over next time, is whether that bothers you."

Arthur did not think about that, not one bit, but it did nag the back of his mind enough at the time, apparently, that he forgot his umbrella.

Coming back to the warehouse at night, though, he might have guessed he would regret that.

Arthur could recognize the sound and tone of an Eames interrogative from a hundred feet away at this point. This was coming from the warehouse, and Arthur wished to all heaven he had let his umbrella just rot there.

Because this meant Eames still sat beside Cobb after hours, which meant Cobb still went under. Arthur had never, after the once, gone under on his own time again, and he had never let himself find out if Eames had been telling the truth about Cobb doing it.

" – got my unrevivable millstone, and you've got your inacessible one. Yes, I know about that. I'd say we're even." That was Cobb's voice.

"You're calling it right, on the inaccessible target, and if you like I'll take it as a cue to stop the conversation, but no, we're not even. You know perfectly well no one ever jumped off a – no one ever went that sort of insane from my type of trouble, and also mine's not a millstone."

"I am right then. I was wondering about that," Cobb's voice said.

"At some point the scrawny thing got under my skin," Eames' voice said. "And also at some point after I started paying attention the scrawny thing also got all grown up and uptight and far, far too condescending."

"Some would call you condescending, Eames," said Cobb's voice, and Arthur thanked the Lord above someone had finally said it to Eames' face.

"Enough derailing," said Eames' voice, quietly. "It's no joke, Cobb. This isn't enough and I will not sign up to start picking up pieces once they start tumbling."

"Then maybe you should stop in advance," said Cobb. "Since you're so sure they'll start tumbling."

Arthur ducked until he heard Eames walk out of the warehouse, and knew there would only be one person here afterhours after this.

More importantly, it occurred to him to actually look into Eames' past. Eames might not need any research to read Arthur, but Arthur saw no shame in not reading Eames like a book with a glance.

The results were much less dramatic than Arthur might have guessed, though Eames' laugh about artillery back when they first met did make more sense. He wasn't able to find anything about a dead wife or a son, so what that conversation fragment with Cobb had been about was still anyone's guess.

But the truth was they got along well enough by the next job. Arthur was less, he supposed Nash would call it sensitive, but really he supposed they had figured out how to navigate each other. He never had to pull out any of his research on Eames to retaliate against something, for one.

And that about closed the file on the friendly forger Arthur could never stand until after Nash had lost it himself and been willing to give it all up for a chance to see his girlfriend again, until Arthur had nearly forgotten about Eames entirely.

"When she comes back, you're going to have her building mazes," said Cobb.

"Where will you be?"

"I'm going to go find Eames."

 

"Eames," said Arthur, who might have known. Then a loose synapse fired, and he remembered: "No, he's in Mombasa. That's Cobol's backyard."

Cobb had stopped being hypersensitive about Arthur and Eames a few missions back, which was just as well, because they could mostly make it work now. Eames was still a man Arthur liked more in theory than in person, but it was not a veiled objection, and Cobb didn't take it as one.

"That, Ariadne, would be a kick," said Eames, and Arthur turned to look at him with the same sort of exasperation he usually reserved for Cobb. This was a much more comfortable substitution for how things used to go – either Arthur had gotten used to it, or it was in fact now a more light-handed assault on Arthur's entire selfhood.

"Thank you for your contribution, Arthur," Eames also said, and Arthur wondered yet again at how someone so invasive could afford to be so volatile in his defensiveness.

"Security's going to run you down hard," said Eames, and in that moment, in the adrenaline and the pride and the blood pounding in his ears still, Arthur didn't feel a bit the bizarre rub of a comment off-kilter, of misfiring charm, of misgauged intimacy.

"And I shall lead them on a merry chase," he said, almost giddy.

"Just be back before the kick," Eames said, lightly, agreeably.

There was a threat like rock beneath those words, and the punches to the gut never got easier from this guy.

There was no vote of confidence there. No concern and admiration and no confidence. No trust. Eames was warning him. Reminding him, because it was important, because their asses were on the line, don't let that kid Arthur lose sight that he was responsible for running that kick smoothly and saving them all from limbo.

But if it never stopped hurting, and if it always, always managed to blindsight him and catch him by surprise no matter how the sight of Eames told him to brace himself, at least there was this: that Arthur's professional confidence in himself was no longer something that could be shaken. Plumbed accurately, it wouldn't be wanting.

He was still seething. "Go to sleep, Mr. Eames," he said, and barely contained the rough edge to his voice.

 

VI.  
Eames' face, when they awoke from the Mongolian hordes dream, was not one Arthur had ever seen on him before. It was shock, and relief to be alive, and emotional exhaustion, and – there was no question; Arthur had shared those moments with people before, had seen that look before – that moment, that memory, was going to be just for the two of them.

It wasn't that unusual for people to have totems anymore. It had gotten round, and it was no longer a sign of weakness. People were getting older and more experienced, and too many of them by now were living in glass houses with regards to their grips on reality.

But the totems themselves were still guarded. They would always be. It was still understood that you had power over another dreamshare operative if you knew their totem; it was still understood that if you touched someone's totem, chances were good they would try to get you killed within the week.

Cobb knew Arthur's totem, of course – though he'd found out in a roundabout way. Ariadne, too. Ariadne right now knew more about each of them than Arthur liked to even think about.

And it hadn't really been a rational moment. But there Eames had been, and as Arthur turned to check back over his head he saw Eames, frozen, before a Mongol whose face made even Arthur's pulse stutter in horror. He recognized that face; he'd looked at it in a glossy eight by ten printout not months before. It was Eames' mother.

Arthur had always known himself to be a pragmatist, but he would always count it as one of his proudest moments, that it did not even occur to him to use this against Eames. And if it occurred to him to try to win this round, if it occurred to him that this was a chance for role reversal, that it was his chance to save Eames and kill the projection and then look at Eames and dare him to protest at this invasive display of how much more he knew about Eames right now than was decent, well, Arthur was only human.

Besides, he didn't do it. And instead, inexplicable, meaningless almost, something inside of him advised:

"Let _go_ ," instead.

So Arthur said, "Hold this," and tossed a small red die in Eames' direction.

Only after the dream ended, only after Eames had caught it and stared at Arthur and barely reacted in time to dodge a blow and then killed his mother, only after Eames' look once they'd woken up, only after Arthur got back onto his feet and took his first, slightly seasick steps forward out of the warehouse – only then did the feeling strike him.

Satisfaction.

Arthur felt satisfied.

*

Arthur hammered unapologetically and without reserve against the door of Eames' room until Eames finally opened it.

His hair was unruly, and he looked bleary and drained and, once he caught sight of Arthur, almost afraid.

"I'm testing something," said Arthur.

Eames let him in.

Arthur moved to the bed and sat down on the corner, while Eames stayed upright, pacing.

"I'm testing out," Arthur began again, but Eames interrupted, running a hand through his hair, "That die was a totem, wasn't it."

Arthur stayed quiet; he knew Eames would read the yes in his silence.

"That die was your totem. You have a totem, and you gave it to me."

Arthur shrugged.

"I don't," Eames began, and for a moment his voice was almost pleading. "I can't understand – "

"Well, in a way that means I did win that round," Arthur said. "You would never have read that move in a million years."

"Read – " began Eames. "That's unf – "

"I know," Arthur said. "But, with you at least, I think I never stopped playing that one round of poker. Trying to keep my cards to myself and getting furious if ever I was called. And, to be fair, you make anyone defensive, forgers are social my ass, socially you're a tacky, miscalibrated mess."

Eames opened his mouth to protest, but Arthur forged on.

"But that's not right," he said. "I've been playing it wrong. My metaphor's been wrong."

"It wasn't meant to be a competition," Eames said. "Life isn't – "

"More to the point," said Arthur, "communication isn't. By definition. It makes no sense that way and furthermore it will never happen that way."

He looked Eames in the eye.

"I am pretty sure," he said, "that underneath a mishmash of schemes and concerns and trying to keep projections off my own neck and figuring out what the situation was and feeling vindicated and coming up with plans – somewhere underneath all that, when I saw you frozen there, somewhere in my head I was panicking a little over it."

"Arthur, I – "

"And then I gave you my totem."

Arthur didn't break eye contact. He said: "And here I am."

They barely knew each other, except in the useless, hopelessly intimate ways. There was no possible reply. There was no rational course of action right now, except Arthur's getting up, which he wasn't about to do.

So the silence drew on, thick as butter, fraught and hopeless and interminable, as comfortable as breathing.


End file.
